Rod Liddle

I had mixed feelings about the sacking of Roger Scruton from the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, following comments he made to the New Statesman. On the one hand it was utterly shameful and gutless on the part of the government, although no worse than one has come to expect from members of a party that is conservative in name only. On the other hand, I have never been a huge admirer of Roger’s aesthetic sensibilities, no matter how eloquently they are expressed. He seems to have no time for anything which has happened since about 1738. I can’t be exactly sure what he had in mind for our towns and cities, but I suspect it would either be motte and baileys plus stockades, or at best a kind of fey neo-Regency cringing.

Who is your favourite brave Remainer Conservative MP? Anna Soubry has to be near the top of the list, for having remarked before the referendum: ‘We are trusting the British people. We will go to the people, and let the people decide whether or not to stay within the EU.’ And then at about lunchtime on 24 June 2016 bravely insisting that we should take not the slightest bit of notice of what the British people had decided. Or what about that brave no no-deal triumvirate of the early Victorian funeral directors ‘Hammond, Grieve and Gauke, for Exceptional Service in the Sad Event of Your Passing’, sunlight palely glinting on a cheap coffin lid?

You can buy the latest edition of Thomas Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice for just over three hundred quid, but I wouldn’t advise it. Short on jokes, in my opinion. A product of its time, fastidious early Victoriana striving desperately for the coming paradigm: scientism. Old Erskine was possibly the bastard offspring of one of our better lord chancellors, the libidinous Whig Thomas Erskine, who was born in Edinburgh and served under Grenville and Fox in the supposed ‘Government of All the Talents’ — as opposed to the one we have now, which is the ‘Government Of No Fucking Clue Whatsoever’. Thomas Erskine was a proponent of parliamentary reform and acted as defence counsel for Thomas Paine, which is chiefly why he is remembered — i.e.

Amongst the wrath we should pour upon our elected politicians – yes, especially the Tory Remainers and Labour’s bereft and shameless MPs – let's keep some in reserve for the stoic, hardline, Brexiteers, huh? I’m with them: no deal is better than her deal. I agree. But – and this is the argument I’ve been having with people for the last three weeks, maybe longer – there is no prospect of no deal going through. None whatsoever. You can cleave to the idea of it for as long as you like, but there is not the remotest prospect of it happening. Why do they not understand this? You have to see the world as it is, not as you would like it to be. And yet they seem utterly incapable of that.

And that, my lovely friends, is it for Brexit. You kippers and ERGers who think we'll leave with no deal, are deluded. They will not let it happen. They were never going to let it happen. Brexit has been killed by a Parliament which by a two-to-one majority never wanted it, despite what lip service they paid to respecting the will of the people. The liberal elite has won. I suspect it will be its last victory before it is expunged.

Would anyone like to join me in the “Five Days of Prayer” that Archbishop Welby has announced to mark the days that we leave the European Union? (Yes, sure, IF we do. Otherwise I assume there will be five days of rejoicing.) I will be praying on Day One for Welby to be replaced by a less gullible, less virtue signalling, less privileged person. Day Two will be a prayer that the Church of England start dealing with personal morality rather than grandstanding political gestures. Day Three will be the prayers to stop Muslims preaching in CofE churches, until such time as Islamic states allow Christians to proselytise without getting their heads chopped off. Day Four will be a prayer that Welby finally grasps that austerity might be a salient response to a serious economic problem.

I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle leisure centre in south London in about 1985. Mike is one of the Labour MPs to have announced their resignation from the Labour party this week, in order to sit as members of the imaginatively named Independent Group. Back then he was something relatively senior in Labour’s Walworth Road HQ, I can’t recall exactly what. The match was between Walworth Road and the researchers and speech writers, of whom I was one, who worked for Neil Kinnock’s shadow cabinet, in the House of Commons. We viewed our Walworth Road comrades with enormous distrust, bordering on outright dislike, on account of their leftism, especially Mike.

I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle leisure centre in south London in about 1985. Mike is one of the seven Labour MPs to have announced their resignation from the Labour party this week, in order to sit as members of the imaginatively named Independent Group. Back then he was something relatively senior in Labour’s Walworth Road HQ, I can’t recall exactly what. The match was between Walworth Road and the researchers and speech writers, of whom I was one, who worked for Neil Kinnock’s shadow cabinet, in the House of Commons. We viewed our Walworth Road comrades with enormous distrust, bordering on outright dislike, on account of their leftism, especially Mike.